Words&Dirt

“‘Heavenly radiance fills the æther, its rays parallel and straight and, so long as nothing is there to interrupt them, invisible.  The secrets of God’s creation are all told by those rays, but told in a language we do not understand, or even hear––the direction from which they shine, the spectrum of colors concealed within the light, these are all characters in a cryptogram.  The gnomon––look at our shadows on the Green!  We are the gnomon.  We interrupt that light and we are warmed and illuminated by it.  By stopping the light, we destroy part of the message without understanding it.  We cast a shadow, a hole in the light, a ray of darkness that is shaped like ourselves––some might say that it contains no information save the profile of our own forms––but they are wrong.  By recording the stretching and skewing of our shadows, we can attain part of the knowledge hidden in the cryptogram.'”

––Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 75

“I recently read in my local newspaper of a man who painted his house with polka dots.  Apparently, the city had promised to buy his home to secure land for a new development, but they had not followed through on the sale.  He stated that perhaps now the city might get around to the purchase, and he was asking $50,000 more than the original price.  The article concluded with the statement that his neighbors could not have been happy about this action.  Was his act an aesthetic, political, economic, or moral act?  The answer is: Yes (all of the above).

The fact of the matter is that in most cases a developing experience involves multiple dimensions, which are often inextricably intertwined, so that selecting just one descriptive category misses the richness, complexity, and depth of any given experience.  For example, what we tend to call a ‘health’ issue cannot be understood fully without appreciating the economic, prudential, moral, aesthetic, psychological, and social aspects of the experience.  Anyone who works in a health-care profession knows full well that any given ‘health’ issue will typically have economic, social, aesthetic, psychological, spiritual, and political dimensions too.”

––Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science, by Mark Johnson, pg. 38-9